Purpose

RPM has always printed to Windows printers (aka text printing), and printed directly to printers using the Windows port (but not the print driver). We've called the latter raw printing, though "direct printing" could also fit.

It's hard to say which was the favorite between those; some customers used the "raw" print only, like a traditional print server only with more options.

Others depended on Windows printing. We would hear from them about font issues and how text lined up, particularly how it fit in the borders. RPM has a lot of horsepower when it comes to sizing text but sometimes you had to supervise the actual text settings.

More outputs

Adding to these two mainstays, we adopted the following from customer requests:

Print to file: beefed up our ability to archive print jobs

Print to PDF: generating PDFs from print jobs was a priority when we designed RPM 5.0

Print to email: attach a print job to an email, or in some cases convert directly to an email

Print to file

RPM can archive your print jobs to disk. Further, we provide the following benefits:

RPM makes job metadata plus current date and time available to form a filename. You fill in the format you want, RPM does the rest.

RPM by default does filename collision, so you won't be overwriting one print job with another

RPM can run any transforms on your data before archiving. You can send SCS data from an iSeries and get RPM to save as plain text. You can save print jobs as HTML files or PCL. Of course, PDF is well supported.

RPM can also use login credentials to print directly to a network folder.